A Study On Effectiveness Of Dictogloss On Development Of Senior High School Students’ ESL Skills

Dictogloss is a text-based, task-based, learner-centered and interactive teachingtechnique to help learners to learn and use the target language on a text basis, withemphasis on both meaning and form in the meanwhile. As a controlled writing, thegoal of dictogloss is to develop learners’ receptive and productive competence inlanguage learning. Wajnryb (1990) consider it as an effective method to make learnersacquire the knowledge of the target language in the stage of testing their hypothesesand reconstructing the text. At home, some scholars advocated dictogloss in foreignlanguage teaching such as Liang Hongmei, whose study indicates that dictogloss is aneffective way to create conditions for SLA (2004).Based on previous theoretical and empirical studies, this study focusing onapplication of dictogloss is intended to find out whether dictogloss practice inclassroom teaching has positive effects on senior high school students’ ESL learningoutcomes and what specific English language skills it would affect on. The studyprobes into the three questions:(i) Does dictogloss practice in classroom teaching have any positive effects onsenior high school students’ ESL learning outcomes?(ii) What specific English language skills, listening and writing in particular,would dictogloss practice affect?(iii) What attitudes do the students have toward dictogloss practice?The author conducted the experimental study in two groups (CG and EG) ofsubjects in Senior Two in the same teaching curriculum. The instruments used in theexperiment were questionnaire, pretest and post test in order to collect data, whichwere treated by SPSS11.0and through the quantitative analysis of correlationcoefficients and Cronbach’s alpha reliability. The statistical results show that at thebeginning of the experiment the two groups had nearly the same level in Englishproficiency, but the experiment group moved ahead with better achievements at the end of the experiment.The major findings of this research indicate that dictogloss practice helps improvelearners’ performance on their English skills, including listening comprehension,reading comprehension and writing ability in particular. Moreover, group work ofdictogloss practice can easily create a democratic atmosphere in class, which reducesthe students’ anxiety and strengthens their self-confidence. Therefore, dictoglosspractice is proved to be a method to overall improve learners’ English language skillsand motivation.